June 18, 2009

We’ve all been there – you’re reading along through the comments in a blog post, and two (or more) of the commenters start getting into a written tussle, a back-and-forth that gets increasingly heated and increasingly irrelevant to the original post topic.

It’s similar to watching two drunks arguing at a party; the usual reaction from more sober bystanders is, “Get me out the heck out of here.” Same thing on a blog – readers see all that racket and click away for more rational discussions elsewhere. Maybe a few want to hang around and watch the train wreck, but really, why feed the voyeurs?

If you’re the blog administrator, what should you do when your post is hijacked like that?

It’s easy to remove stupid, obviously spammy comments from trolls, but what about apparently rational readers who have a bone to pick with each other?

On the Perceptive Travel Blog, I wrote a post about the Art Car Parade in Houston, Texas – a really fun and quirky annual event with wildly decorated cars. Two commenters starting disagreeing about whether a woman in the parade had shouted foul language at bystanders, particularly children.

Since their own language remained relatively civil, I didn’t remove any of their comments, even when the Cranky Factor escalated.

My view is that it’s usually not a good idea to remove comments once they’re posted because yes, people DO remember that they were there, and as long as the discussion was reasonable, readers will wonder what the blog owner is trying to hide or squelch. They’ll often leave comments asking about the missing comments, too. (At times like that, you’ll be almost ready to swear off of two-way communications like blogging….)

So, after my one “let’s all calm down” comment failed to stop the additional verbiage coming in from these two women, I closed all comments on the post.

I’ve never done that before – it felt a bit odd, but I figured if I was tired of reading about who-said-what, my readers were as well, and my first responsibility on that blog is to provide good travel-related content, not a platform for those two to holler at each other.

Here’s what I wrote in the final comment:

“I’m now closing comments on this post, which is supposed to be about the Art Car Parade and not devolve into a “who said what in Houston.”

Dawn, I know you submitted another long comment in response to Nikki’s comment, but I really do not want my blog (which I think of as my house) becoming a platform for arguments about some other woman’s actions and whether they occurred or not on the day of the parade.

For all the other readers, just go see the danged event, but any verbal or actual brawling that occurs there is out of my control.”

That’s my take on the situation – most comment brawls only make the commenters look silly, not the blog author, but at some point, hey, it’s MY blog. The comments are an integral part of any blog, but if they run off the rails, they also run the blog off the rails. I stopped the train.